Coming Home(194)

I know this hasn’t been easy for you, but no one looking at you would ever know that. You come here week after week with that beautiful smile on your face, walking through security and having your bag searched, sitting through chaperoned visits like it’s the most natural thing in the world. You’ve taken a miserable situation, and you’ve managed to make it bearable somehow, for both of us.

Even in the beginning, when we were struggling to get it right, you never let me doubt anything. Not us, not your feelings for me, not myself. It used to be so hard for me, watching you walk away after a visit and coming back to this. All I’d want was to be with you again, to see you and hear your voice, and then I’d spend the rest of the day wondering if you were missing me as much as I missed you—if you were hurting as much as I was. And I’d hate myself, because it was me who put us in this situation. It’s so easy to get caught up like that in here, to spiral down into the bullshit. But anytime I’d come close to sinking, I’d get your letters, or your pictures, or the books you’d send with the little notes you hide inside for me, and every doubt, every fear, would be gone.

I know it’s not enough to say this, but thank you. Thank you for agreeing to have lunch with me that first day, and for not running from my ridiculous behavior after that. Thank you for allowing me to get to know you, even when I didn’t deserve your patience or understanding. Thank you for trusting me—for giving me your heart and your body and changing me forever in the process. Thank you for dealing with all the trouble that comes with loving somebody like me. Thank you for being brave enough to fight for us when I was too afraid to do it. And above all, thank you for making me feel like myself again. For taking me, flaws and all, and loving me anyway. You have never once let me doubt your feelings for me, and I just want you to know that you are absolutely everything to me. And it’s all I need, just to know that somehow, I managed to do something right in my life by finding you.

I love you more than I could ever express, in writing or in words.

Missing you always,

Danny

Leah read the letter three more times through the blurred vision of her tears before her eyes fell closed, and she folded it carefully and brought it to her lips. She could have sworn she smelled traces of him on the paper, and she inhaled deeply as a tear slipped over her lower lashes and down her cheek.

With a tiny sigh, she opened her eyes and pushed off the couch, making her way back toward her bedroom. She opened the box of his letters she kept next to her bed, placing the new one on top before grabbing the pen and pad off her nightstand.

Leah sat back against the headboard with the pad balanced on her thighs, beginning her letter to him the same way she’d started every one she had written for the past nine months:

Danny,

One day closer to the day you’ll come back to me, and I love you more now than I did yesterday…





Leah had just turned off the water in the shower when she heard the muffled sound of her phone ringing in the other room, and she whipped the curtain open and hopped out, cursing as she caught her right foot on the edge of the tub in her haste.

She hobbled over to her towel and swung it around her body before she rushed out of the bathroom and over to her nightstand.

“Hello?” she said, attempting to secure the towel.

“Hey,” Robyn said. “Why do you sound so out of breath?”

“Because I’m extremely out of shape, apparently,” she said, walking back to the bathroom. “I just ran to get the phone.”

“Well, sorry that I made you exercise,” she laughed. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m definitely coming tonight. I’ll bring a barf bag if I have to.”